# Railway pricing explained: plans, usage rates and real bills in 2026 > How Railway's Hobby and Pro plans, per-vCPU and per-GB usage rates, volumes and egress add up, with three worked monthly bills and what changes on a prepaid wallet. - **Published:** 2026-10-13 - **Author:** Abhishek Jaiswal - **Category:** Engineering - **Tags:** railway, pricing, railway-alternative, cloud-cost, prepaid-wallet - **Canonical URL:** https://ownkube.io/blog/railway-pricing-explained - **Cover:** https://ownkube.io/blog/railway-pricing-explained.png --- Railway charges a small monthly subscription and then bills the CPU, memory, storage and network your services actually use. The subscription includes the same amount of usage, so a quiet project pays the plan price and a busy one pays the plan price plus overage. This post walks through each line on a Railway bill, using list prices from Railway's pricing page as of 2026-10-13, and works three real monthly bills. **TL;DR** - Railway has a Free plan with $1 of monthly credit, a one-time $5 trial, a Hobby plan at $5 a month that includes $5 of usage, and a Pro plan at $20 a month that includes $20 of usage. - Usage bills at about $20 per vCPU per month and $10 per GB of memory per month, measured on what each service actually uses. Volumes cost about $0.15 per GB per month and egress $0.05 per GB. - Included usage is a monthly allowance. Whatever you do not use that month is gone, and anything past it lands on your card after the fact. - A small app with a Postgres database comes to roughly $18 a month on Hobby. The same stack on Ownkube's metered rates and a $4 database box is about $12, drawn from a prepaid wallet where unused credit never expires. - To price your own stack across Railway, Render, Fly.io and Ownkube, use the [cloud cost calculator](/tools/cost-calculator). ## What are Railway's plans? Railway sells four tiers. The subscription is the floor of your bill, and each paid plan includes usage credit equal to its price. | Plan | Price | Included usage | Who it is for | |---|---|---|---| | Free | $0 | $1 of credit a month | Trying the product | | Trial | $0 | $5 one-time credit | New accounts | | Hobby | $5 a month | $5 of usage a month | Personal projects and side apps | | Pro | $20 a month per workspace | $20 of usage a month | Teams and production apps | Enterprise pricing is custom. Pro adds team features and higher resource ceilings, and the per-unit usage rates stay the same on both paid plans. ## How does Railway usage billing work? Every service on Railway is a container. Railway samples how much CPU and memory each container uses and multiplies it by a per-unit rate. You do not pick an instance size; you set limits, and the bill follows the meter. | Resource | Railway list rate (2026-10-13) | |---|---| | CPU | about $20 per vCPU per month | | Memory | about $10 per GB per month | | Volume storage | about $0.15 per GB per month | | Egress | $0.05 per GB | Two things follow from this model. First, an idle service is cheap on CPU, since a container sitting at a few percent of a core bills a few percent of $20. Memory is the line that keeps billing, because a Node or Python process holds its memory whether or not requests arrive. Second, a database is just another service: a Postgres container bills CPU and memory like your app, plus its volume. ## What does a real Railway bill look like? Three common shapes, priced from the rates above. Usage is the monthly average a service actually consumes, which for most small apps sits well below its limit. **A small API on its own.** Average 0.1 vCPU and 0.3 GB of memory, 5 GB of egress. - CPU: 0.1 x $20 = $2.00 - Memory: 0.3 x $10 = $3.00 - Egress: 5 x $0.05 = $0.25 - Usage: $5.25. On Hobby the $5 subscription covers the first $5, so the bill is about $5.25. **An app with a Postgres database.** The app averages 0.25 vCPU and 0.5 GB. Postgres averages 0.1 vCPU and 0.5 GB with a 5 GB volume. 10 GB of egress. - App: $5.00 CPU + $5.00 memory = $10.00 - Postgres: $2.00 CPU + $5.00 memory + $0.75 volume = $7.75 - Egress: $0.50 - Usage: $18.25. Hobby covers $5 of it, so the bill is about $18.25. **A small team's backend.** Four services, each averaging 0.5 vCPU and 1 GB, on Pro. - Each service: $10 CPU + $10 memory = $20 - Usage: $80. Pro includes $20, so the bill is about $80 before databases and egress. The pattern: the plan price stops mattering quickly. Past the smallest projects, the bill is the meter. ## Does Railway credit roll over? No. Included usage is a monthly allowance that resets each billing cycle. A Hobby project that used $2 of its $5 still pays $5, and the unused $3 does not carry forward. We cover the details in [does Railway credit roll over or expire](/blog/does-railway-credit-expire). Railway is also postpaid. Usage past the included amount is charged to your card at the end of the cycle. Railway lets you set usage alerts and a hard usage limit that stops services when reached, and it is worth turning both on for any project you are not watching daily. ## Where is Railway good value? Railway's per-unit model is honest, and for some workloads it is the right one. - **Spiky or mostly idle services.** Metered CPU means a service that wakes for a few requests a day costs little on CPU. - **Many small services.** No minimum instance size, so ten tiny services cost what they use. - **Polished developer experience.** The canvas, templates and preview environments are some of the best in the category. Where it gets expensive is memory-heavy, always-on work. At $10 per GB per month, a 2 GB service costs $20 a month in memory alone, every month, before it does anything. ## How does the same stack price on Ownkube? Ownkube also meters CPU and memory on actual use, at about $18 per vCPU per month and $4.50 per GiB per month. Databases run on a flat database box instead of a metered container, with storage at $0.25 per GB per month. Outbound traffic bills by region: $0.02 per GB in the Germany region and $0.13 per GB in the Mumbai region. | Stack | Railway (Hobby or Pro) | Ownkube (Germany region) | |---|---|---| | Small API (0.1 vCPU, 0.3 GB, 5 GB egress) | about $5.25 | about $3.25 | | App + Postgres (app 0.25 vCPU / 0.5 GB, 5 GB database, 10 GB egress) | about $18.25 | about $12.20 | | Four services at 0.5 vCPU / 1 GB each | about $80 | about $54 | For the app with Postgres, the Ownkube line is $6.75 of metered app usage, a $4 DB 0.5 box, $1.25 of storage, and $0.20 of egress. The difference is mostly memory: $4.50 per GiB against $10, and a database that sits on a flat box instead of billing memory by the hour. The bigger difference is the billing direction. Ownkube runs on a prepaid wallet. The Personal plan is $5 a month and loads $5 of credit; Team is $20 and loads $20. Usage draws the wallet down per minute, you top up when you need more, and **unused credit rolls over and never expires**. When the balance runs out, apps pause with their data kept until you top up, so the most you can spend is what you loaded. If you want a fixed price per app, switch it to a flat reserved box, for example a Spark 1 at $5 a month for 0.25 vCPU and 0.5 GiB. ## FAQ ### How much does Railway cost per month? The minimum is $5 a month on Hobby, which includes $5 of usage. A small API often fits inside that. An app with its own Postgres database usually lands between $15 and $25 a month, and a team on Pro pays $20 a month plus whatever usage passes the included $20. ### Is Railway free? Railway has a Free plan with $1 of monthly credit and a one-time $5 trial. That is enough to try the product, though most apps that stay up all month will need Hobby. ### Does Railway charge for idle services? Yes, mostly through memory. CPU is metered on use, so an idle service bills little CPU, but the memory a running process holds bills at about $10 per GB per month whether or not it serves traffic. ### What is Railway's egress price? $0.05 per GB of outbound traffic as of 2026-10-13. Inbound traffic is free. ### How do I stop a Railway bill from growing? Set a usage alert and a hard usage limit in your workspace settings, and size memory limits on each service. If you want the cap enforced by the billing model itself, a prepaid wallet does that: you can only spend what you have loaded. ## Where Ownkube fits If you like Railway's metered model and want lower rates on memory, a flat database box, and a bill that can never run ahead of your balance, Ownkube is the closest swap. The same app moves without a rewrite, and the [Railway alternatives guide](/blog/railway-alternatives) covers the other options if the wallet is not the deciding factor. 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